President Trump “has been painfully out of his element. Two years in, he remains ill suited to the complicated, thankless, often grinding work of leading the nation.” Clearly there is a crisis, but “the crisis is in the Oval Office. The president has exaggerated threats but ignored the hazards his border policies created.”

“When it comes to the border and the wall, Trump’s willful estrangement from reality is so profound that network executives and newspaper editors spent part of Tuesday in strategy sessions about how to respond to his inevitable barrage of falsehoods. Should there be a crawl of words on the bottom of the television screen to correct him in real time? Could fact checkers work speedily enough to post rebuttals online…? This is where we find ourselves. Other presidents have been untrustworthy, and others have had to be called out on it. But not like this. This is surreal.”